Finding and hiring highly qualified employees or talent for specific jobs is one of the most important objectives an employer undertakes. In furthering the employer's objective of hiring the best possible employees, an employer would ideally have access to detailed information regarding as large a pool of talent as possible and the pool of talent would include prospective employees who are highly qualified for the particular job that the employer seeks to fill. Without such information, a great deal of time and expense is often expended by employers in connection with their recruiting and screening functions, while, nevertheless, achieving unacceptable results.
Traditionally, employers have found potential talent among new school graduates through school-related job counseling resources, in response to classified advertisements for particular jobs, referrals from existing employees, and through the use of third-party recruiters (“headhunters”). Each of these alternatives is inefficient, and some are costly, as well. Furthermore, employers' articulation of the skills they seek to hire are imprecise. Typically, school-related job counseling resources, classified advertising, and word-of-mouth referrals deal in generalities.
When an employer seeks to hire an experienced employee, the pool of talent, within which a search is conducted, is often limited to individuals who have already worked in a particular job within a particular industry. Although it may be meritorious that a prospective employee has current or prior experience in a particular job within a particular industry, individuals with experience in other jobs within other industries may possess the particular skills that an employer requires for a particular job. Yet there exists no efficient means for identifying such individuals in other fields who may possess the precise skills sought by the employer. Consequently, an employer's employment recruiting and hiring processes and subsequent operations would be greatly enhanced if the employer could efficiently and cost-effectively identify highly qualified talent both within and without the industry and occupational categories.
Another employment problem faced by employers is that they often do not know when a particular employment position may become vacant. Specifically, while it is a business courtesy to provide two weeks notice of termination of at-will employment, employees occasionally terminate employment with less than two weeks notice. Additionally, it may occur that an employee may be terminated for a reason necessitating less than two weeks notice, and injury, illness, or death may cause an employee to become unavailable to perform his or her job function. Further, even if a full two weeks is available to hire a replacement employee, frequently two weeks is not enough time to hire a person, particularly for skills that are in high demand.
Another problem faced by employers is that they may stop searching for more highly skilled employee(s) than they have, if an employment position is currently filled. Consequently, an employer's recruiting and hiring processes, and subsequent operations, would be greatly enhanced if the employer could efficiently and cost-effectively identify highly qualified talent on a continuous basis. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a practical continuous recruiting system.
Another employment problem faced by employers is that there is no uniformity among employers in how they communicate the requirements, compensation, and benefits of their employment positions to the public. As a result, it is difficult for talent to efficiently and cost-effectively identify the universe of employment positions for which their skills may be suited. Consequently, an employer's recruiting and hiring processes, and subsequent operations, would be greatly enhanced if the employer could efficiently and cost-effectively communicate detailed information about the skills and experience they require, and the compensation and benefits they offer, in a structured manner that facilitates the search by talent for optimal employment opportunities.
At the same time that employers are encountering difficulty in identifying highly qualified employees (“talent”) to fill specific employment positions, talent is struggling to find the employers and employment opportunities that best match the talent's skills and objectives.
For talent, establishing and developing a career involves finding, researching, and targeting employers. Traditionally, talent has used the same sort of inefficient means to find employment opportunities as employers have used to find talent. Talent has generally relied on school placement resources, replying to classified advertisements, and word-of-mouth referrals from persons who may already be employed by a particular employer, a process that is as inefficient for talent as it is for employers. And traditionally, talent has relied on résumés to present their qualifications, yet there is no uniformity of résumés among talent. Talent generally must “tailor” their résumés to respond to particular employment opportunities, and talent may have only a limited understanding of the skills being sought by a particular employer. As a result, résumés are often unwieldy devices for employers to consider.
Also, it may be difficult for talent to determine which employers to target for potential employment, and which potential opportunity represents the optimal use of their skills. Accordingly, talent can waste much time and energy trying to find the right position and may, nevertheless, fail to find an optimal position.
Furthermore, it is difficult for talent to identify an appropriate format for expressing his or her skills to an employer. It is also difficult for talent to know what types of information to share with a prospective employer. Consequently, it is advantageous for talent to have the ability to maintain his or her résumé, including a detailed description of training, skills, and experience in a uniformly structured manner on both a current and cumulative basis (a “talent profile”).
Even when a person is employed in a desirable position, economic or other circumstances may cause the unexpected termination of his or her employment. Specifically, talent may be laid-off or terminated at an unanticipated time. Even if a talent is not terminated, economic conditions may cause his or her employer to go out of business. In some circumstances, talent will be provided with adequate notice or severance pay to allow for adequate time to seek other employment in the event of undesired termination. However, in some circumstances, there is inadequate time. Accordingly, there is a need in the job placement industry for systems that allow talent to be continually in the job market or at least ready to enter the job market on short notice.
Known methods of recruiting include the process by which a manager will prepare a job description, and send the description to a human resources (“HR”) department, which may check its files of résumés to determine if a qualified applicant has previously contacted the company. The HR department may also consider qualifications of internal candidates, and finally, the HR department may place a classified ad in a newspaper or trade publication. The company may also retain the services of a professional recruiter, who may have connections with suitable talent. In addition to classified ads in printed publications, other media may be used to publish advertisements for talent.
As distributed computer networks such as the Internet have become widely used, it has become possible to provide classified employment ads to mass markets via on-line databases and publications. Most major newspapers now have on-line editions that may be used to search classified ads for job positions. For example, the employment classifieds of the Kansas City Star newspaper may be searched on line at http://www.kansascity.com.
Such on-line databases provide convenient access by employers to an audience that is potentially beyond the scope of coverage of subscribers to the printed newspaper. The on-line databases also have an advantage to talent in that talent is better able to search for jobs by geographic location or keyword. Of course, both of those features are present in regular newspaper classified advertising. Nevertheless, on-line databases of classified ads share the same major drawbacks as printed classified ads. First, both are highly unstructured and without uniformity of job parameters. Second, both solicit highly unstructured résumés without uniformity from prospective job candidates. Third, both involve the placement of advertising in exchange for an up-front payment obligation by the employer/advertiser.
Because a cost is associated with posting a classified ad, there is an economic disincentive for employers to post jobs other than those for which there is a current (or currently expected) vacancy. Furthermore, the classified advertising model employed by newspapers and existing on-line employment sites attracts almost exclusively jobs for which there are current (or currently expected) vacancies. Accordingly, many fewer jobs are advertised than actually exist, and because much of the talent that is currently employed are not continually looking, the jobs that are advertised attract a much smaller pool of highly qualified talent than actually exists. This situation is bridged at significant cost to employers by their use of headhunters who recruit currently employed persons who may be willing to change jobs for a better opportunity, but are unwilling to continuously bear the burden of the search effort.
For employers with on-going recruiting and employment problems, the inefficiencies of existing mediums of finding the best, and, in many cases, sufficient talent for a job is a serious problem that contributes to on-going operational inefficiencies. Likewise, for talent who would like to have access to the complete picture of available jobs, the economic disincentive placed on employers to provide information about all of their jobs is a serious problem that diminishes talent's ability to optimize his or her career.
For employers, the classified ad system allows a company to develop a group of résumés of persons who have responded to ads. Employers may also consider classified ads placed by talent, indicating that they are available for employment. However, there is a similar economic disincentive for talent to pay for publication of a classified ad. Further, this combined group of talent résumés is small in relation to the potential universe of talent, and it does not provide an employer with the detailed and comprehensive information necessary for employers to select an ideal candidate.
Other recruiting systems are basically improvements to the newspaper-based classified ad system. Several improvements have been proposed and implemented. Specifically the Monster.com job board, which may be found at www.monster.com, collects résumés and allows posting of classified employment ads. Systems like Monster.com represent an improvement to the traditional classified ad system, in that these types of bulletin boards collect résumés for free. Nevertheless, the posted jobs are essentially searchable classified ads, and the résumés posted on Monster.com are not searchable without payment of a significant fee. Again, this places an economic disincentive on employers to search out the best qualified candidate for a job.
The Monster.com site indicates that it is covered by U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,497 to Jeffrey C. Taylor (“the Taylor patent” or “Taylor”). The Taylor patent describes a system for managing classified employment ads, using of two databases to store information about résumés and about jobs.
Taylor discloses providing job industries, company identifiers, job disciplines and job the purposes of adding, changing, and deleting job records. Employer-users are charged for contact information on applicant users. Fees are structured as a basic subscription charge allowing a predetermined number of accesses, with a predetermined fee associated with each access above the predetermined number of accesses.
Several other on-line job sites collect information about applicants and provide this information to prospective employers in various ways; however, these systems suffer from drawbacks similar to those of the Taylor patent. Specifically, Hotjobs.com, Ltd. (www.hotjobs.com) allows a user to choose a city and also to specify a corresponding metropolitan area. Using HotJobs, a user can search for a job in New York, for example, and find jobs in nearby cities, without knowing the names of the other cities.
To use the HotJobs site, a job search user first registers by providing his or her E-mail address and a password. Next the job search user is prompted to either paste in the text of an existing résumé or to answer a set of questions that will provide for the automatic generation of a résumé. In addition to asking questions pertinent to the résumé, the HotJobs system asks job search users about the types of jobs they are seeking, whether they are willing to relocate, and whether they would like their résumé to be searchable by employers and/or recruiters. If the job search user elects not to allow his or her résumé to be searchable, the résumé will only be accessible by those employers that the job search user specifies by using a process described below. An arbitrary job search user of the HotJobs web site may search all of the posted jobs. By registering and creating a résumé, the job search user can apply to any of the posted jobs.
Like Monster.com, HotJobs.com charges for posting jobs. Therefore, the same economic disincentives are placed on employers that would use the HotJobs system as is placed on employers that would the Monster system.
Accordingly, known on-line job advertising systems represent only minor improvements over the traditional newspaper-based employment classified advertising system. And the known on-line job advertising systems retain the significant economic limitation of being based on the newspaper employment classifieds paradigm. The services charge employers for posting their 20 jobs, just as in the newspaper model, and then they charge fees for merely having the ability to search through the database of talent résumés.
Because the pay-to-post and subscribe-to-search systems impose upfront economic barriers on employers, the systems have the disadvantage of providing a disincentive for all employers to post all of their jobs. Further, when talent knows that only a subset of available jobs are posted and that employers are charged to search résumés, talent will not be optimally motivated to use the career site.
In order to avoid the economic barriers presented by traditional print and on-line media to the comprehensive posting of employment opportunities, some employers have established employer-owned Internet sites wherein they list some or all of their employment positions. Such sites, to the extent that the employer has listed all of its employment positions, can provide a prospective employee with a comprehensive view of opportunities with that employer, but not with any other employer. Therefore, while employer-owned sites avoid the economic barriers of classified advertising, they do so at another cost—the loss of broad exposure to the available pool of prospective employees, most of whom are unaware of the employer-owned sites.
While the Internet theoretically allows an unlimited number of prospective employees to visit an employer's web site to view potentially all of such employer's positions at little or no cost to the employer, that benefit is accomplished via the transfer of economic burden to the prospective employee who must search countless employer sites hoping for a comprehensive view of employment opportunities. Some people have attempted to reduce the cost-transfer defect of employer-owned sites by creating “collector” sites that electronically link to various employers' separate sites. Such collector sites are mere conduits that may attract incremental attention from prospective employees, but do little, if anything, to ultimately eliminate the economic burden that is shifted to prospective employees. This is because the employers continue to post their employment positions to their separate sites. Under such collector systems, the prospective employee must still periodically visit each site in order to acquire a comprehensive up-to-date view of the market place of employment opportunities. That burden imposes substantial economic costs on the prospective employee due to the significant time inefficiencies entailed.
Accordingly, a system is needed that does not have the limitations of existing systems, and that encourages the participation of all employers and all talent in an economically efficient, on-going process of optimizing the use of available skills.